Where Are the Best Places to Buy a Home? — Dollars and Sense

With 15-year mortgage rates at an all-time low of just 3.11 percent, many people are thinking about making a home purchase. But where you buy could determine how good the investment will turn out to be.

To determine the smartest places to buy, Realtor.com analyzed February housing and jobs data for about 150 metropolitan areas, looking at things like real estate listing prices, sales prices, and inventory trends, as well as how much home prices have fallen in the past five years and each area’s unemployment rate, since job availability has an impact on housing demand.

Taking all that into consideration, here’s the list of the 10 best cities in which to buy a home right now, along with each area’s median list price (for more data, see the full report):